CHAWKI ABDELAMIR was
born in Nasiriyah, southern Iraq in 1949. He graduated from Baghdad's College
of Literature in 1970. In 1977 he was awarded higher degrees from the Sorbonne,
Paris, in comparative literature and literary criticism and settled in
Paris, where he still lives. In 1993 he founded and directed the Rimbaud
Centre for International Poetry in Paris and in Aden, Yemen, where it was
situated in the house in which Arthur Rimbaud lived. He was an advisor
to UNESCO 1996-2002 and later directed UNESCO's Kitab fi Jareeda
[Book in the Newspaper] project. Since 1 December 2003 he has been the
Iraqi cultural consultant for UNESCO. He is a consultant editor for the
French poetry magazine Poesie. Chawki Abdelamir has translated many
anthologies of poetry from Arabic to French, and has published 11 collections
of his own poetry in Arabic, with six published in French translation.

SALIH J. ALTOMA was
born in Iraq. He is Professor Emeritus of Arabic and Comparative Literature
at Indiana University, USA, and has been associated with the university
since 1964. He was its director of Middle Eastern Studies (1986-1991) and
chair of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures department (1985-1991). He
has published works in Arabic and English on modern Arabic literature,
on Arab and Western literary relations, and was guest editor of The Yearbook
of Comparative and General Literature, Volume 48, 2000, whose theme was
Arab-Western Literary Relations.

SINAN ANTOON was born
in Baghdad in 1967. He left Iraq in 1991 after the Gulf War and lives in
the US. His poetry and articles (Arabic & English) have appeared in
magazines and newspapers and his first novel, I`jaam [Barbarism]
(Beirut, 2003) is being translated into English. His first collection of
poems Mawshur Mubalalal bil-Hurub [A Prism; Wet with Wars] is forthcoming.
He returned to Iraq in July 2003 to film a documentary on post-war Iraq
entitled About Baghdad. He is studying for a PhD in Arabic Literature at
Harvard.

MICHAEL AYRES was born
in Nottingham, England, in 1958. He's the author of two volumes of poetry:
Poems
1987 -1992 (Odyssey Poets, 1994), and a.m. (Salt
Publishing, 2003); and of two pamphlets in the Poetical Histories
series:
no. 4, 1976 Streets (1998), and no. 51, The Sky That Was Your
Guide (2000). The three long poems published here - Above, Cult
and Decibel - are from the unfinished draft of his third book, When
the Volts Flowed. The epigraph to When the Volts Flowed comes
from Yukio Mishima's novel, The Decay of the Angel, and reads: "The
perfectly ordinary girl and the great philosopher are alike: for both,
the smallest triviality can become the vision that wipes out the world."
Waterfall
is a recent poem. An informal introduction to the author�s earlier work
can be found archived on the Shearsman
website.

FADHIL AL-AZZAWI was
born in Kirkuk, north Iraq, in 1940, and by the age of fifteen was writing
and publishing poetry - to date he has seven volumes of poetry, eight novels,
a collection of short stories, two works of criticism and numerous literary
translations into Arabic from English and German. He acknowledges an enormous
debt to the cultural diversity of his home town, where Arabic, Assyrian,
Kurdish and Turkish were the everyday languages. His collection In Every
Well a Joseph is Weeping, translated by Khaled Mattawa, won the US
Quarterly Review of Literature's international poetry book competiton in
1997. In 2003 US BOA Editions published Miracle Maker: Selected Poems
of Fadhil Al-Azzawi, also translated by Khaled Mattawa. He has a BA
in English Literature from Baghdad University and a PhD in journalism from
Leipzig University. He spent three years in jail under the Ba'athist regime
and left Iraq in 1977. He settled in Germany, where he still lives.

SARGON BOULUS was
born in Iraq in 1944 into an Assyrian family. He is a poet, short-story
writer and translator. He lives mainly in San Francisco and has the rare
experience of being an Iraqi poet caught up in the American poetry scene
since the late sixties. One of the most influential Arab poets
today, he is passing this on to the new generation of young Arab poets
through his poetry. He started publishing poetry and short stories in 1961,
contributing to the influential Shi'r [Poetry] magazine of Yousef
Al-Khal and Adonis in Beirut. His poems and translations have since appeared
in numerous Arab magazines and newspapers and he has published six poetry
collections. He is well known as a translator into Arabic of English and
American poets such as Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, W. S. Merwin, Shakespeare,
Shelley, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath,
Robert Duncan, John Ashbury, Robert Bly, Anne Sexton, John Logan, and many
other poets including Rilke, Neruda, Vasko Popa and Ho Chi Min. He is a
consulting editor of Banipal.

SAMIA AKL BOUSTANI is
a Lebanese literary critic and translator who lives between Beirut and
Paris.

MAHMOUD AL-BRAIKAN
was born in al-Zubair, southern Iraq. He studied law at Baghdad University
in the 1940s. From 1953 to 1959 he was a teacher in Kuwait, then returned
to Baghdad and completed his law studies in 1964. He taught Arabic language
and literature at Basra's Teachers' Training College until his retirement
in the 1990s. He was killed in his Basra home on 28 February 2002, apparently
by thieves.

"The few early poems that were known by specialists
and some friends were enough to give Mahmoud al-Braikan an equal or a near-equal
voice to that of Sayyab and other pioneers of Iraqi and Arabic modern poetry.
His legendary long and (for some) strange silence and the deliberate distance
he maintained from all literary and social affairs, have now taken on a
prophetic meaning. They shielded him from any kind of compromise with Saddam's
Iraq where a writer who respected himself and the creative ethic had to
learn early how to keep silent." Kadhim Jihad, writing about Al-Braikan
in Banipal No 17.

BERTOLT BRECHT was
the most influential German dramatist and theoretician of the theatre in
the 20th century. Also a poet of formidable gifts and considerable output,
Brecht first attracted attention in the Berlin of the 1920s as the author
of provocative plays that challenged the tenets of traditional theatre.
In the 1950s he became an internationally acclaimed playwright and director
through productions of his plays by the Berliner Ensemble, a company based
in East Berlin and headed by his wife, actor Helene Weigel. Brecht was
born in Augsburg, Bavaria, in 1898. Raised in a comfortable middle-class
home, he attended secondary school in Augsburg and studied briefly at the
University of Munich. In 1924 he gained a foothold in the cultural metropolis
of Berlin as an assistant dramaturge (drama specialist) at the Deutsches
Theatre. He achieved enormous popular success following the 1928 premiere
of his collaborative effort with German composer Kurt Weill, Die Dreigroschenoper
(published 1928; translated as The Threepenny Opera, 1964). Forced
to flee Germany in 1933 because of his leftist political beliefs and opposition
to the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, Brecht and his family spent 14 years
in exile in Scandinavia and the United States. Although he tried hard to
become established in the United States, Brecht failed to make a breakthrough
either as a scriptwriter in Hollywood, California, or as a playwright on
Broadway. He returned to Europe in 1947 after he was forced to give evidence
before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Two years later he moved
to East Berlin and remained there until his death in 1956.

MELISSA BROWN has an
MA in poetry and a PhD in English Literature, both from the University
of Iowa. She has published poetry, translations, poetry reviews and literary
criticism, and is a writer and editor at Buckle Down Publishing in Iowa
City.

VALENTINO GIANUZZI
lives in Lima, where he was born in 1976. He graduated in Hispanic Literature
from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and has
worked as a journalist, translator and assistant editor. He is currently
editing the complete fiction of Peruvian writer José Diez-Canseco.

JESSE GLASS recently
passed the 3rd level of the National Japanese Proficiency Examination.
He is now, officially, an intermediate student. At this rate, he
will be 70 years old before he passes the highest grade, but he continues
to have hope. To keep his spirits up he maintains a blog at www.ahadadabooks.com,
reads as many books as he can, writes from midnight to five in the morning,
lifts weights at a nearby gym, plays with his kids, and travels.
Recent writing in Visiting Walt (University of Iowa Press), The
Golden Handcuffs Review, Shearsman and Angel Exhaust.
His publishes the Ahadada Readers,the latest of which featured Alan
Halsey and Geraldine Monk.

CAMILO GOMEZ-RIVAS studied
contemporary Lebanese and Palestinian literature at AUB and worked as a
translator and journalist in Syria and Lebanon. He is a doctoral student
in medieval studies at Yale University, USA. He translates medieval and
contemporary Arabic poetry into English. He is a regular contributor to
Banipal.

JAMES
GRAHAM and Lenara Verle's Photographs
and Other Fictions website (www.donkeyraver.com)
won the Jean Giono Prize at the Gremone Digital Conference at the same
time that Verle's film Gridcosm won first prize at the VAD festival
in Gerona, Spain. His Delirium
Tremens New York, which first appeared in Masthead, was published
in France last year.

ALAN HALSEY'SMarginalien,
a comprehensive collection of poems, prose and graphics 1988-2004, will
be published on April Fool's Day 2005 by Five
Seasons Press. The book includes a CD-Rom of the text-graphic work
Memory
Screen which is being shown this spring at the Bury
Text Festival. He is the editor of West
House Books.

BRIAN HOLTON was born
in Scotland and educated at the Universities of Edinburgh and Durham.
He has taught Chinese at Edinburgh, Durham and Newcastle upon Tyne, and
English Literature at Ningbo University. In 1997 he established the UK's
first Chinese-English translating & interpreting programme at Newcastle.
He is currently teaching translation at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
He has published a wide variety of translations from modern and pre-modern
Chinese literature, as well as articles and essays on translation and translating.
Apart from his work in English, he also translates into his native Scots.

BULAND AL-HAYDARI (1929-1996)
was born in north Iraq on September 26, 1926, moving to Baghdad as
a boy. He started writing poetry in Kurdish and then turned to Arabic.
Involved in left-wing politics, he was jailed in 1963 and put under a death
sentence, only his reputation as a poet saving his life. He then lived
in Lebanon until 1976 when he returned to Baghdad. He left Iraq when Saddam
Hussein came to power, settling in London, where he co-founded the Union
of Iraqi Democrats. He published twelve collections of poems plus three
editions of his collected works. His poems have been published in English
translation in many poetry anthologies.

MATT HETHERINGTON
is
a musician and writer based in Melbourne. He is Contact Officer:
Victoria for the Australian Haiku Society, and haiku can be found in the
First
and Second Australian Haiku Anthology. 'Spoken Word' pieces have been
broadcast on television (Channel 31's Red
Lobster). He also writes reviews for Cordite,
and is currently Vice-President of Overload
Poetry Inc. Some current poetic inspirations: Jellaladin Rumi, Emily
Dickinson, Colin Reeves, Paul Eluard, Tom Joyce, Maurice Blanchot.

VICENTE HUIDOBRO was
born in Santiago, Chile in 1893, and died in 1893. A flamboyant figure,
he was the self-proclaimed father of the short-lived avant-garde movement
known as Creacionismo ("Creationism") and a prominent figure in the post-World
War I literary vanguard in Paris and Madrid as well as at home in Chile,
and he did much to introduce his countrymen to contemporary European innovations
in poetic form and imagery. In 1916, after publishing several
collections of poetry in Chile and achieving recognition and notoriety
for literary manifestos as Non serviam (1914: "I Will Not Serve"),
in which he rejected the entire poetic past, Huidobro went to Paris. There
he collaborated with the avant-garde French poets Guillaume Apollinaire
and Pierre Reverdy on the influential literary review Nord-Sud ("North-South").
He went to Madrid in 1918, where he was enthusiastically received in avant-garde
literary circles and in 1921 he was one of the founders of Ultraísmo
(Ultraism), the Spanish offshoot of Creationism. Traveling frequently between
Europe and Chile, he was largely responsible for creating the climate of
literary experimentation, based on French models, that prevailed in post-World
War I Chile. He accomplished this as much through his well-publicised exploits
(such as his semi-serious candidacy for the presidency of Chile) as through
his frequent magazine articles and poetry. Continuing to write in the Creationist
idiom in such novels as Sátiro; o, el poder de las palabras
(1939; "Satyr; or, the Power of Words"), Huidobro also remained a prolific
poet in that style long after the movement itself had collapsed. Huidobro's
work exerted a strong influence on later Latin-American poets.

ABDUL KADER EL JANABI
was
born in 1940 in Baghdad. He has published a number of books of poetry,
critical essays, several anthologies of contemporary Arab poetry and has
founded and edited literary magazines such as Grid, al-Noqta, Le désir
libertaire, Faradis and at present Arapoetica. He is also active
as a translator, both of his own work into French and sometimes into English,
and of poets such as Paul Celan, Miroslav Holub, Benjamin Péret,
Joyce Mansour, René Daumal, Max Jacob, Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg,
among others, into Arabic. He left Iraq in 1971 and has lived in Europe,
mainly Paris, ever since. His latest collection
Nés à
Bagdad [Born in Baghdad], by Stavit Editions, Paris, was written in
collaboration with Israeli poet Rony Somek. His autobiographical narrative
Vertical
Horizon, was published in French, German, Spanish and Italian as part
of the Mèmoires de la Mediterranée project of the
European Cultural Foundation.

KADHIM JIHAD was born
in south Iraq in 1955 and has lived in Paris since 1976. He is a poet and
translator, publishing his poetry in literary magazines for 25 years, with
two collections. He has translated many authors into Arabic, including
Arthur Rimbaud, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jean Genet, Juan Goytisolo,
Philippe Jaccottet. His latest work, with introductory study, is the first
free-verse translation of Dante's Divine Comedy into Arabic (UNESCO,
Paris, & Arab Institute for Research and Publishing, Beirut, 2003).
He lives in Paris, and teaches at the Sorbonne.

PIERRE JORIS is apoet,
translator & essayist. He left Luxembourg at age 19 & has
since lived in the U.S., Great Britain, North Africa, and France. Rain
Taxi praised his collection, Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999,
for "its physical, philosophical delight in words and their reverberations."
Since then he has published two chapbooks of poetry: Permanent Diaspora(Duration
Press) and most recently The Rothenberg Variations (Wild Honey Press,
Ireland). In 2003 Wesleyan U.P. brought out his collection of essays A
Nomad Poetics. Recent translations include Paul Celan: Selections
(University
of California Press, 2005), Lightduress by Paul Celan (Green Integer,
2004) and 4x1: Work by Tristan Tzara, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Pierre
Duprey & Habib Tengour (Inconundrum Press 2002). With Jerome Rothenberg
he edited the award-winning anthologies
Poems for the Millennium
and, just out from Exact Change, Pablo Picasso, The Burial of the Count
of Orgaz & Other Poems. He often performs his work in collaboration
with vocalist & visual artist Nicole Peyrafitte, most recently touring
their multimedia show SumericaBachbones throughout Europe &
the US. He currently teaches poetry and poetics at University in Albany,
NY where he lives with Nicole Peyrafitte & their son Miles. During
fall 2003 he was Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
Visit Pierre Joris's website at www.albany.edu/~joris/.

TREVOR JOYCE was born
in Dublin, Ireland, in 1947. He co-founded New Writers' Press in Dublin
with Michael Smith, and his first book was NWP's initial
publication in 1967. Joyce was also a founding editor of NWP's influential
journal, The Lace Curtain. He has published nine volumes of poetry,
including The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine (1976), his working of the
middle-Irish Buile Suibhne, and stone floods (1995), which
was nominated for the
Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry. His
most recent publications are
with the first dream of fire they hunt
the cold: A Body of Work 1966-2000 (NWP & Shearsman Books , 2001)
and the audio CD Red Noise of Bones (Coelocanth & Wild Honey
Press, 2001). Founder and director of the
Cork
International Poetry Festival since 1997, he served as Writer in Residence,
NUIG, 2001-2002. Awarded a Literary Bursary by the Irish Arts Council (2001),
Joyce was a Fulbright Scholar for the year 2002-2003. Two chapbooks, Take
Over and Undone, Say, were published by The Gig,Toronto,Canada,
in an edition of 150 copies in late 2003.�

DANIJELA KAMBASKOVIC-SAWERS
is a literary critic, translator, writer, and, whenever possible, a jazz
singer, currently doing PhD work on the sonnet sequences of the English
Renaissance as a RAACE Scholar at the Macquarie University in Sydney. She
writes in Serbian and English. Her poems, literary translations and criticism
have been widely published in literary periodicals and on-line journals
across the countries of the Former Yugoslavia (Knjizevne novine, Knjizevni
list, Mostovi, Teatron and Ludus - Serbia; Diwan and
Album
- Bosnia Herzegovina; Litkon - Croatia; Ars - Montenegro),
as well as in New South Wales Law Journal (Sydney, Australia) and
The
Wolf Poetry Magazine (London, U.K.) Her first collection of poetry,
Atlantis,
will appear in Serbia and Montenegro in September 2005. The appearance
in Masthead is her Australian poetic debut. Danijela lives in Geneva,
Switzerland, with her husband, expecting a baby daughter in March 2005.

ABDULKAREEM KASID was
born in 1946 in Basra, Iraq. He graduated in 1967 in philosophy from Damascus
University, Syria, and has an MA in Translation from the University of
Westminster, UK (1995). he taught psychology and Arabic literature in Iraq
and Algeria. He left Iraq in 1978, taking a week-long desert camel journey
to Kuwait. In Aden, Yemen, he worked as an editor of New Yemen Culture
magazine,
then lived in Syria during the 1980s. He currently lives in London. He
has published many collections of poetry, his first in 1975, the latest
in 2002.

FAWZI KARIM was born
in 1945 in Baghdad. As a teenager he looked after the library of a mosque
in old Baghdad, where he discovered the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. He
published his first collection of poems in 1969. After studying Arab literature
at the University of Baghdad, he started teaching at a high school, where
suspicions about the "perversity" of his "communist ideas" led him to be
relieved of his post on the rise of Saddam Hussein. He went into exile
in Beirut, and the theme of Exile began to be one of the most moving elements
in his later work. In Beirut he published his second volume (1972) and
the Iraqi government let it be known that he was free to return to Baghdad.
There he published an essay, "On Exile and the Consciousness of Exile"
(1973) and his third collection (1977). In his new book of poems, he proclaimed
his firm opposition to all forms of repression, which led to his going
into exile again in the following year, this time to London, where he still
lives. In 1983, 1988 and 1990 he published three more collections. In 1995,
Continent
de douleurs, in French translation by Said Farham, was published in
Switzerland.

DANIEL KEENE was born
in Australia in 1955. His multi-award winning plays have been acclaimed
throughout Australia, in the United States and Poland. Since the
late 1990s there have been more than 50 productions of his work in France,
and he is now considered one of the most significant contemporary playwrights
in European theatre. He has won the South Australian Premier's Prize for�
Drama, the Victorian Premier's Prize for� Drama (twice), the Wal Cherry
Play of the Year, The New Dramatist's Award, New York and the NSW Premier's
Prize for Literature (best play) twice.� The 2002 production of his play
Terminus,
directed by Laurent Laffargue at the TNT in Toulouse and the Théâtre
de la Ville in Paris, won the coveted Le Prix Pierre Jean Jacques Gaultier
award for best direction. His most recent French productions were
To

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Whom It May Concern (Théâtre de la Commune, Paris),
Paradise
(Théâtre de la Ville, La Commune, Paris) and Because You
Are Mine (Théâtre de l�Opprimé, Paris) in late
2004. Website: danielkeene.com

JAMES KIRKUP is a
poet, novelist, dramatist and translator. In the mid-1990s he won the Japanese
Festival Foundation Prize for A Book of Tanka, and the Scott Moncrieff
Prize for literary translation. In 2002 his translations of Japanese poets
Fumiko Miuro and Fumi Saito were published. He has translated numerous
books by French authors and a number by Japanese poets. His complete
works are published by Salzburg University Press, with some virtual books
available on www.brindinpress.com.
His latest collection of his own poetry is Islands in the Sky (2004),
and published for the first time in the UK is his No More Hiroshimas
(Spokesman Books, August 2004)). He is a regular contributor to Banipal.

DOUGLAS KIRWAN'S
work has been acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria, The Latrobe
University Art Museum, The Charles Nodrum Gallery and other private collections.His
work has been featured in several publications. Exhibitions include eight
solo shows at the Charles Nodrum Gallery, Pinocotheca and Gallery Irascible.
These shows include paintings, scultpures and works on paper. He
has participated in 18 Group Shows including the La Mama Theatre Poster
Exhibition, the Charles Nodrum Collection at the Benalla Regional Art Gallery,
the Charles Nodrum Gallery, The Cask at the The Access Gallery in
the National Gallery of Victoria, the Aussie Icon Tour throughout
Australia, Made In Cuba at the 1997 Fringe Festival, four Mornington
Art Centre Print Prize shows and several Regional Galleries

VALERIE KIRWAN is
a full-time writer of novels, plays and short stories. She studied
English Literature at Melbourne University, and then had many forgettable
jobs including teaching English and Drama and also working in a local nursing
home, which was the basis for her novel The Moon is Bloodshot (Hornet's
Nest Publishing). In 1974 she began writing, directing & performing
in her own plays. Fourteen of her plays have been staged at various
venues including La Mama Theatre, Carlton Courthouse, The Botanical Gardens,
St Martin's Theatre, LaTrobe University and Anthill Theatre. Her
first novel, The Will to Fall, was published by Penguin Books in
1984 and made it onto the 12 top best selling list in the same year. Her
short stories have appeared in various Australian anthologies. Lovers
& Losers of the Last Century (a collection of four novellas published
by Indra Publishing) was nominated for the 2003 Victorian Premier's Literary
Award. Her new novel, Taking A Fool To Paradise, a psychological
thriller, was launched by Indra Publishing in December 2004. The
novel is based loosely on her play, The Art of Lobster Whistling,
which she wrote and directed as La Mama Theatre's first Playwright-In-Residence.
She has received three literary awards.

KHALID AL-MAALY was
born in al-Samawa, Iraq, in 1956. He has lived in Cologne, Germany, since
1980, where, in 1983, he founded the independent Arabic publishing house,
Al-Kamel Verlag, publishing to date over 200 titles, including many that
break with taboos and censorship in the Arab world. Seven collections of
his poetry have been published, some in German. He has translated the poets
al-Sayab, Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Sargon Boulus, Saadi Youssef, Ounsi
el-Hage into German, and from German to the Arabic major volumes of poetry
by Paul Celan and Gottfried Benn, and writes for German national newspapers.

ABDEL RAHMAN AL-MAJEDI
was
born in Baghdad in 1965. He graduated from Faculty of Languages, Baghdad
University, in 1989. He left Iraq in 1992 and became a journalist on Iraqi
exile newspapers. He has published his poetry in several Arab newspapers
and magazines. In 2002 his first collection was published, Akhtaam Hijeriya
- ma maalik li Ghadin Hayraan (Dar Makhtutat, Holland). Since 1997
he has lived in Holland.

SALLY ANN MCINTYRE
is an Australian born writer residing in New Zealand. A selection of her
poetic work can be found at the New
Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre. She has worked as a scriptwriter
on devised performance, experimental documentary film and sound/text projects,
as well as writing art and music criticism, and catalogue essays. She has
curated and co-curated exhibitions, live music events and radio broadcasts.
Currently enrolled in the postgraduate programme in Contemporary Art Curatorship
at the University of Canterbury, she is researching artistic and curatorial
strategies dealing with sound, and artistic work which hybridises music
and the expanded field of the visual arts; including experimental radiophonic
projects, sound sculpture, media art and audio poetics. She often DJs her
eclectic, New Zealand inflected experimental music collection under the
name of .pindrop, and is currently learning to ring church bells by the
English change ringing method.

KHALED MATTAWA was
born in Libya in 1964. He is author of two books of poems, Ismailia
Eclipse, and the recently released Zodiac of Echoes. His translation
of Saadi Youssef's Without an Alphabet, Without a Face, was published
in 2002 and received the PEN poetry in translation award. In 2003 BOA Editions
published Miracle Maker, his translations of selected poems of Fadhil
al-Azzawi. He teaches creative writing in the English faculty at the University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is a contributing editor of Banipal.

SOPHIE MAYER is the
author of Marsh Fear/Fen Tiger (Salt), These are the Licks
(Fair Ladies), and junkmaildays (above/ground). She spends her time
looking for non-institutionalised forms of expression in the academy, selling
books at the Toronto Women's Bookstore, thinking about films for NOW
magazine, and writing a blog at www.shebytches.com.

PETER MINTER is a
poet, editor and reviewer living in Sydney, where he teaches Indigenous
Studies at the Koori Centre, University of Sydney. He has published five
collections of poetry, including the 2000 Age Poetry Book of the
Year Empty Texas (1999 Paper Bark Press, Sydney) and more recently
Morning,
Hyphen (2003 Equipage Press, Cambridge). He was a founding editor of
Cordite
in 1997, coedited Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets in 2000,
and was poetry editor of Meanjin from 2000 to 2005. His work has
been published and anthologised in various Australian and international
publications, such as The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry.
blue grass, his next book, will appear with Salt
Publishing in 2005.

ADNAN MOHSEN was born
in 1955 in Baghdad, Iraq, in the working-class district of Al-Kasrah, on
the banks of the Tigris.

GERALDINE MONK was born
in England in 1952. Her work has appeared in many of the major anthologies
including Conductors of Chaos, The Oxford Anthology of 20th Century
British & Irish Poetry and the first Ahadada Reader. Noctivagations,
her 2001 collection of poetry and other texts, was published by West
House Books and her Selected Poems from Salt Publications appeared
in 2003. More information and a personal web page will be available
shortly on www.westhousebooks.co.uk.

RICHARD JEFFREY NEWMAN
is an essayist, poet and translator who has been publishing his work since
1988, when the essay "His Sexuality; Her Reproductive Rights" appeared
in Changing Men magazine. Since then, his essays and poems have
appeared in Salon.com, The American Voice, On The Issues, The
Pedestal, Circumference, Prairie Schooner, ACM, Birmingham Poetry Review,
Potomac Review and other literary journals. He is an Associate Professor
in the English Department of Nassau Community College in Garden City, New
York. He has given talks and led workshops on writing autobiographically
about gender, sex and sexuality. His Selections from Saadi's Gulistan,
the 13th century Persian masterpiece, has just been jointly published by
Global
Scholarly Publications and the International
Society for Iranian Culture. His own book of poems, The Silence
Of Men, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press. He is currently translating
selections from Saadi's other masterpiece, the Busitsan. Website:
www.richardjnewman.com

SALAH NIAZI was born
1935 in Iraq and has lived in Britain since 1963. He is a poet, critic
and translator and was founder-editor of the Arabic literary journal Al-Ightirab
al-Adabi. He has published seven collections of poetry and has translated
into Arabic Shakespeare's Hamlet and Macbeth, and James Joyce's
Ulysses.

GOLALA NOURI was born
in Kirkuk, Iraq, in 1969. She has a diploma in electrical engineering and
a certificate in Translation from Arabic to English. She has two collections
of poems. She lives in Kirkuk.

SIMON PERCHIK is
an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker,
and elsewhere. Readers interested in learning more about him are invited
to read Magic, Illusion and Other Realities at www.geocities.com/simonthepoet
which
site lists a complete bibliography.

MOUAYED AL-RAWI was
born in Kirkuk, Iraq, in 1939 and is a painter, poet and journalist. He
played an important role in the cultural life of 1960s Iraq. He left Iraq
in the early 1970s for Lebanon where he published one collection, Ihtimalat
al-Wudhuh [Probability of Clarity] in 1978. He lives in Berlin.

COLIN REEVES was born
in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1944. He migrated to Australia in 1965. Recently,
he has completed an MA in writing and literature. Resembling Deleuze and
Guattari's theory of rhizomes (lines of flight and assemblages, etc), he
is currently working on a dark, psychological novella in collage form -
interfacing the subconscious, religion, sex and world events with virtual
reality, temporality andcyberpsychosis.

TERRY RENTZEPIS is
self-taught. A life-time doodler, Terry began painting after undergoing
major back surgery. At the urging of his wife, he picked up a paint
brush to fight back the long, lonely and painful hours of recovery.
He lives in Coconut Grove, Florida with his wife Sheri, their eleven-month
old son Jake, a doberman named Ghost, a min-pin named Face and a rat called
Ghetto. Website: alltenthumbs.com

SADRADEEN was
born in 1963 in Kirkuk, Iraq, into a Kurdish family. He completed his degree
in 1986 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad, and has shown his work
in group exhibitions in Arbil, The Netherlands, Brussels and Amman, He
has had solo exhibitions in Amman (1999) and in the USA (2001, 2002, 2003,
2004). He was forced to leave his country in the late 1990s and first
went to Jordan. Then later with his family he emigrated to America, settling
there in 2000.

"The search for a paradise that has disappeared,
the reflections on the simple and invisible things of this world, the depth
of the substance of creatures, and a penetration into the profundity of
the human spirit ... this is my particular world. My paintings are expressions
full of modernity; they are also childish dreams in colour, expressive
of the sweet passing of the beauty, the symbols and the myths of old civilisation.
The creatures of my work are mythical poems illuminated by the charm of
my country which comes from a distant past - part of it still found in
nature, the other part already perished. It is pure, personal discovery."-
Sadraldeen

HASHEM SHAFIQ was
born in Iraq in 1950. He published his poems first in Baghdad, then in
Beirut, Damascus, Nicosia, Prague and London where he now lives. He has
published 12 collections of poetry and one novel. Selected poems have been
translated into English, French, German, Italian and Polish.

SAMUEL SHIMON has
worked as a journalist and cultural editor, and since 2001 has developed
and edited online Arabic newspapers including his own Arabic-English literary
website, www.kikah.com. Born into
an Assyrian family in Al-Habbaniyah, Iraq in 1956, he left his country
in 1979, and has since lived in Damascus, Amman, Beirut, Nicosia, Aden,
Cairo, Tunis, and Paris finally residing in London. He began writing autobiographical
short stories in 1979 and poetry in 1985, publishing in Arab newspapers
and magazine. Since 1998, he has been the assistant editor of Banipal
magazine, which he co-founded with its editor Margaret Obank. In
2000, he and Obank edited A Crack in the Wall, poems by sixty Arab
poets from the last twenty years of the 20th Century. In 2005, his autobiographical
novel An Iraqi in Paris was published in English translation.

SAADI SIMAWE was born
in Diwaniyah, Iraq, in 1946. He left Iraq in 1976, taught Arabic and English
at high schools in the Sahara from 1976-1980, and has lived in USA since
1980. He is associate professor of English at Grinnell College, Iowa.
He teaches African-American literature and literary theory. He has
published many articles in English and Arabic, and a novel (in Arabic)
Al-Khuruj
min al-Qumqum, London 1999. He guest-edited MPT's issue on Iraqi
Poetry Today (No 19), translated Palestinian poetry for MPT
No 14 and edited the Arab Studies Quarterly Issue No 19, 1997, on
Modern Iraqi Literature.

VIVIAN SLIOA was born
in Baghdad in 1976. She writes in Arabic and Swedish. Her poetry has been
published in a Swedish anthology and she has published two collections
in Arabic, Ahzan al-Fusul (Dar al-Manfa, Sweden, 1997) and Atiyaan
(Damascus, 2003). She lives in London.

MICHAEL SMITH founded
the New Writers' Press in 1967, and has been responsible for the publication
of more than sixty books and magazines. Through New Writers' Press he has
promoted the modernist tradition in Irish poetry, publishing the work of
Thomas MacGreevy, Denis Devlin, Brian Coffey, Niall Montgomery, Charles
Donnelly, Anthony Cronin, Michael Hartnett, Paul Durcan, Trevor Joyce,
and a host of other poets. He was founder/editor of the influential literary
magazine The Lace Curtain and for many years now has been
a regular literary reviewer and features writer for The Irish Times.His
poetry has appeared in numerous magazines both in Ireland and abroad and
in many important anthologies of contemporary Irish poetry, including The
Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, edited by Derek Mahon and
Peter Fallon, and Contemporary Irish Poetry, edited by Anthony Bradley
(University of California Press, 1980, 1988). In 2001, he was the first
Irish recipient of the European Academy Medal for distinguished work in
the translation of poetry, awarded by the European Academy of Poetry.

FADHIL SULTANI was
born in Iraq in 1948 and left the country in 1977. He is a poet, translator
and is cultural editor of As-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper in London. He has
translated The Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison into Arabic and poetry and
an anthology of 50 Britiish poets, 1950-2000, is forthcoming. He has three
collections of poems.

CÉSAR VALLEJO
was born in 1892 in Santiago de Chuco, a small town in north central Peru,
the youngest of eleven children. He completed his secondary schooling in
1908 and entered the School of Philosophy and Letters in 1910, but was
forced to drop out for lack of money. He eventually achieved his degree
in 1917. In 1920 he returned to his home village and after a violent incident
in which a subprefect's aide was shot at the general store, he was accused
of being an "intellectual instigator" and was jailed for almost six months.
The incident was the catalyst for his departure from Peru two years later,
when he left Peru for Paris. He lived in Europe for the rest of his life
in more or less continuous poverty, unable to return to Peru for fear of
being arrested, and wrote the poems which make up his three posthumous
books and a large number of plays. He died in 1938. During his life he
published two books of poetry: Los Heraldos Negros (The Black
Heralds) in 1918 and Trilce (1922). His posthumous poems comprise
three books: Nómina de huesos (1923-36), Sermón
de la barbarie (1936-38) and
Espana, aparte de mí este cáliz
(1937-38).

STEPHEN VINCENT lives
in San Francisco. Author of Walking (Junction Press), A Walk
Toward Spicer (Cherry On Top Press), and, most recently, Sleeping
With Sappho (faux ebook). An active blogger, various works in progress
may be discovered at: stephenvincent.durationpress.com

YANG LIAN was born in
Switzerland in 1955, and grew up in Beijing. His poems became well-known
and influential inside and outside of China in the 1980s, especially when
his poem �Norlang� was criticized by the Chinese government during the
�Anti-Spiritual Pollution� movement. Yang Lian was invited to visit Australia
and New Zealand in 1988 and became a poet in exile after the Tian�anmen
massacre. He has published seven selections of poems, two selections of
prose and many essays in Chinese and his work has also been translated
into more than twenty languages. Yang Lian was awarded the Flaiano International
Poetry Prize (Italy, 1999) and his book Where the Sea Stands Still:
New Poems won the title �Poetry Books Society Recommended Translation�
(UK, 1999). His most recent translations into English have been Yi,
a book-length poem, and Notes of a Blissful Ghost, a selection of
poems. His new book Concentric Circles will be published by Bloodaxe
Books in 2005.

Ambien is generally prescribed for those who are buy ambien Has anxiolytic, sedative, hypnotic

SAADI YOUSSEF is
one of the most important contemporary poets in the Arab world. Born in
1934 in Basra, Iraq, he left his country finally in 1979 and has lived
in Syria, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Yemen, France, Jordan and Algeria before
settling in London in 1999. In more than fifty years of writing poetry,
he has published over thirty volumes of poetry in Arabic, as well as short
stories and translations of many western poets and novelists, including
Walt Whitman, George Orwell and V S Naipaul. In 2001, his first major English
volume of poems Without an Alphabet, Without a Face, translated
by Khaled Mattawa, was published and won the 2003 PEN Poetry in Translation
Prize.